It's Mass Murder
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Hello, hello, what's up everybody? Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem. I am Dave Smith. Robbie the Fire Bernstein is not with us today. He got a flat tire on his way here this morning. And so, yeah, he was not going to be able to make it. Or he's a liar. I mean, those are the two options. I don't, you know, I wasn't there. I don't know for sure. But I don't think he's lying. Robbie enjoys doing the show from what I gather. But...

We will have a show for you nonetheless. Do not forget, guys, what is it? The day after tomorrow, me and Robbie the Fire Bernstein are headed to Chicago. Thursday night, we got a stand-up show at Zany's in Chicago, which is like, I cannot stress how much it's just like, it's debatably my favorite comedy club ever. It's just a great club. It's downtown in Chicago, which is a great city still, kind of.

Was a great city. I don't know. It's I love I love doing comedy in Chicago. And it's like just this old. I don't know. It just feels like you walk into the 1980s. Like it's just like if these walls could talk, they would tell of criminal stories of comedians doing things in the 80s. And I just I love that type of club. And then.

Friday and Saturday. Oh, we also have a live Part of the Problem podcast at Zany's on the Late Show Thursday. And then Friday, two shows. Saturday, two shows at the Zany's in Rosemont, which is just outside of Chicago. It's also a beautiful club. And I love performing there. So come on out to Chicago this weekend. ComicDaveSmith.com. There are still some tickets available, but they're moving fast. So go grab them now. Okay, so for today's episode, I kind of...

I kind of switched up what I had in mind for this when Rob got his flat tire and I realized I was going to be doing the show solo. I actually thought, you know, instead of... We'll get back to covering the news. There is a lot of interesting stuff going on. We'll get back into that tomorrow. But for today...

I did. I thought maybe it would make sense to spend an episode on this more theoretical topic, but it is something that is it really gets right to the core of why I view things the way I do. Obviously, I'm still in this moment right now where there's a lot of.

you know, attention on this debate that I did with Douglas Murray the other day. This was something that I had mentioned in the debate, and then it generated some outrage, and there were some people who took issue with it. So I just kind of wanted to do an episode explaining more or less like my feelings about war and really the nature of government. And this is

Very foundational to my, you know, strain of libertarianism. And I think really it is the foundational insight of Rothbardian libertarianism is essentially that...

And by the way, I'm sorry, I should mention this. We did talk about this for a few minutes at the opening of, of yesterday's show. And I did, uh, you know, I, I, I did a Pierce Morgan episode yesterday that will be out today at 3 PM Eastern. Um, for you guys watching live for you guys who are subscribed at part of the problem.com you're watching it. That should be out in a couple hours for the rest of you guys. If you're watching it over on YouTube or stuff, I guess earlier today, uh,

this episode was released. But so I got into, you know, an argument with this military expert about the morality of war. And I mean, I was arguing the morality of war. He was arguing the legality of war and was kind of, I mean, you guys tell me, go watch the episode. But I thought just like he seemed unable to,

to grapple with what I was saying. And here it is, the best I can put it. This is the Rothbardian insight, okay? It is essentially that the moral characteristic of a government action

is no different than the moral characteristic of an individual's action or a group of individuals' actions. So in other words, if, you know, the government can call it taxation, but if anyone else did it, you would consider it theft. The government can call it civilian casualties, but if anyone else did it, you'd consider it murder. The government can call it, you know,

I don't know, detainment, but if anyone else did it, you'd consider it kidnapping. And that, and essentially this is all a fiction. It's all a fiction down to, as Frederick Bastiat said, right? The government is the great fiction by which we all attempt to live at each other's expenses. The fundamental insight is that governments do not exist. There's no such thing.

Now, I don't mean to say that they don't exist in any sense, but they're a social construct. They're not real. Like there isn't real. These are titles that human beings make up.

There's like sheriff and prisoner are not real objective things. They're titles that human beings have made up and then given to other human beings. There is no such thing as the state. There is no such thing as the government. Like there are buildings, there are people, there are things that we call those people, but this is not. And in the same sense that like the number four doesn't exist, like there's,

There could be four things, but the number four is something that human beings came up with to help us understand the world. Okay, well, the government is something that human beings came up with. You know, okay, the Rothbardian answer would be that really they were just the gang that took over and then convinced everybody else that they're the government. But even if you want to view like a more classically liberal view of it, it's like we came together to create this thing to protect rights or something like that.

is the founding, the foundation of the United States of America was the Declaration of Independence, which basically makes this argument, right? That God wants man to be free. And so we institute governments to protect our rights. Okay. Now,

That's a little bit sloppy. It's the most beautiful thing that's ever been written. I'm not saying you can't exactly prove it. It's not exactly self-evident that there is a God and that the God wants us to be free, but I sure do like the way it sounds. Anyway, so if you really think about it on some level, and I do think this is why it kind of touches a nerve when, when you talk about this stuff, because on some level, everybody knows this.

Everybody knows this to be true. Just because we all, we're all human beings. We all know that there's no magical... Look, if you believe in morality and if you believe in logic, which you essentially have to, there's no getting around believing in logic. Like inherently, by their very nature...

if you believe in morality and you accept logic, logic and morality cannot be altered by social constructs, right? Like there's just no way you can't, you, you, there's nothing that we could decide. Like if you, let's say like basic logic, right? Like the, the law of non-contradiction. Okay. So if I were to say to you, I do not exist, what's the problem?

with that statement? Well, it's a self-detonating statement. It's a contradiction. You said the word I, and then you claim you didn't exist. You acknowledged what you were, and then it said you didn't exist. So that assertion falls apart because it's logically incoherent. It's contradictory. Okay. Now, there is no, people cannot get together and say, let's have a vote on whether a self-contradicting statement is logically sound.

It doesn't matter if I say, well, no, I'm going to call you senator and I'm going to call you president and I'm going to call you, you know, Supreme Court justice. And you guys get to say that the rules of logic are different now. Like if anyone were to ever propose that, you'd immediately go like, no, you're misunderstanding how logic works. You're misunderstanding how government works. A social construct cannot change things that are objective reality.

Like you just you don't get to do that any more than we'd get to hold like a referendum on gravity. It doesn't matter how you vote. Gravity exists regardless. OK, so if you understand that, like definitionally, you cannot. There is no such thing, as I said on Pierce Morgan the other day, as macro and micro morality, right?

You can't say like it would be immoral to do it here, but it's moral to do it there any more than you could say like, you know, raping someone or murdering someone is immoral in North America, but it's morally accepted in sub-Saharan Africa. Like that just doesn't,

make any sense. It's a contradiction. These things are, if you believe in morality, then by its very nature, it has to transcend all of these things, right? And particularly if you're a religious person who believes in morality, um, then like there, if there, if God is judging us based on what we do morally, there's, it doesn't make any sense that God would go, you know, unless you guys get together and form an organization and then it's totally different.

And obviously, I think this has something to do with the kind of the religion of statism, which is just there's really no other way to describe it. You know, I'm going back to my libertarian roots on this one, but that really is it. I mean, if any other organization were to get together, you know, if Walmart was just like, well, we can murder people.

Like we, cause we're Walmart. Obviously you can't do it, but we can do it cause we're Walmart. I mean, we're this great big company. Everybody would see through that immediately as just being preposterous. Like, obviously that's not, no, you're just doing the same thing. You're just a bigger organization. Yet somehow when governments get involved, because people in their head have this like weird concept of what governments are. I mean, we, myself included, I'm guilty of this, but we will constantly, we'll

use as Douglas Murray called me out for doing kind of, although he didn't mean it like this, we'll say we invaded Iraq, right? Like we did that.

But we didn't, you know, like a bunch of criminals in D.C. did. It's not us, but we still you think of like the nation and the nation state almost as being the same thing. That's us. That's America. But when we're talking about the government, we're not talking about America. We're not talking about the hills or the roads or the people or the tradition or the culture or the or any of that.

Typically, you're talking about the most corrupt members of our society who hold political power. And so with that kind of in mind is the backdrop. What I had said on Joe Rogan's podcast, and by the way, people who listen to the show know I've been saying this stuff for years, which is I happen to say it on a big platform and a big debate. But.

It was specifically arguing with Douglas Murray over the term intentional, because he said Israel is unintentionally killing civilians. And I was like, no, that's bullshit. And in the same sense that if you, you know, the example I use, which I've used many times before, but if you, you know, if somebody broke into your property and killed a few of your family members and then went back to their house and you tracked them back to their house,

And then you just blew up the building and you went, hey, no, we didn't mean to kill all those other people in the building. I mean, we knew they were there. We knew they would die as a result of us blowing up this building. But we just wanted to get that bad guy. The others were like collateral damage. Well, like in any domestic situation, obviously, that you'd be charged with first degree murder. But I'm not making an appeal to the law. I'm saying that morally speaking, as human beings, we would all go, no, that is intentional.

You don't get to just say it's not intentional. If you knew there were women and children who were going to die as a result of this and you did it anyway, then you did it intentionally. And okay, so the essence of the point is that the concept of intentionality is

doesn't change because a government's doing it and because it's being done in another country. Now, if you want to justify, if you want to attempt to justify the policy, okay, but you don't get to say that the laws of logic and the laws of morals don't apply anymore. And so when I'm debating these guys, or when I was debating this guy on Piers Morgan yesterday, he just kept responding to this with,

But you don't understand international law. You don't understand the laws of war. You don't understand. And it's like, no, no, no, no. You don't understand my point. These things are all social constructs. And fine, there might be some benefit to some and there might be some flaws in them. But that has nothing to do with the point that I'm making. This is a fundamental reality.

It's not a subjective opinion. This isn't how I view things. This is just objectively the truth. And okay, so I think what ends up happening with this is that people, you know, the implications of this are like kind of devastating, right?

And I find this, you know, it's a similar thing with peaceful parenting. I've noticed that before. Like when you talk about peaceful parenting, which I'm a big believer in, like I think it's just wrong to hit kids. Okay. Now you can very easily make the argument. It's overwhelming. It's so obvious that like it's wrong to hit kids. I mean, it's literally, it's insane that like you, everybody accepts that it's immoral to hit women, right?

for men to hit women. Maybe not everybody, but just about everybody accepts that. You know, like if somebody found out, like if somebody found out that I was hitting my wife, I mean, I think I would lose an overwhelming amount of support and rightfully so, you know, like if it came out that I was like a wife beater or something like that, people would be like, yeah, I can't ever listen to this guy again. This is like a horrible thing to be. And why is that? Well, it's because obviously like women generally speaking are weaker than men,

It's okay. Kids are far weaker than women, right? Like it's just, and also like if I were to hit my wife, like she has some degree of recourse. She can call the cops. She can leave me. She's an adult. You know, she could, she could try to fight back. She'd grab a weapon. I don't know. I'm just saying she has, kids have none of that, you know? Okay. So you could make this argument. It's overwhelming. By the way, for people who have problems with the argument, I could go much more in depth on that, but I don't want to get too distracted.

But then there comes this visceral reaction when you talk about this. And really it's because of what the implications of it are. It's like the implications are now you're saying my dad abused me. You're saying I abuse my kids. You're saying, but I'm just saying like none of that takes on the argument. And it's fucking crazy. It's fucking crazy that people could find out I hit my kids and it wouldn't have the same reaction if they found out I hit my wife.

By the way, I don't do either. Man, someone's going to clip that up. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Public Rec. I've been telling you about these guys for a little while. The Game Changer Pants from Public Rec. You got to check them out. They're the office pants that look like Monday but fall.

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So this has gotten quite a reaction from several people. So I thought first I would take on... Oh, gosh, I'm blanking on her name, which I... Sorry about that. But I was on... There's this lady who... She put out a video attempting to take on this argument. Alicia. She was...

We were on Piers Morgan once together, and we debated a little bit about some of the foreign policy stuff. And it wasn't a... Whatever, I'm not trying to be mean. She wasn't particularly impressive to me, and it wasn't a particularly constructive debate, but...

Whatever, not debate, but you know, one of these Pierce Morgan panels. But anyway, so she put out a video responding to me making this point on Douglas Murray, on Joe Rogan's podcast debating Douglas Murray. So let's go through this a little bit. And then there's there's another video that I want to respond to as well. So let's but let's start off with this.

Douglas Murray and Dave Smith recently appeared on an episode of Joe Rogan, and there are these constant false analogies. Here was Dave Smith's analogy. If somebody comes and kills a member of your family, and you seek revenge against them, and you know where they live, and you go out and blow up their entire building with them alongside men, women and children inside, you would be convicted of murder of all of them. That is correct. However,

However, that is a false analogy and we're going to explain why. Two key omissions and contortions are: Number one: who has the authority to respond? And number two: what is the objective of responding? In the analogy given, there is a private individual whose motivation is to exact revenge.

Okay, let's pause it here. So, yeah, this is...

You know, you could say we all understand, but this is just nothing. It has nothing to do with the analogy at all. It doesn't even matter. First of all, it's just not true. So like legally speaking, she's not even right. You technically have all of the rights of the cops. Okay, I shouldn't say that. You don't have all the rights of the cops, but you can, cops aren't allowed to kill people aggressively. They're allowed to use self-defense. So are you. You can actually make a citizen's arrest. But regardless of any of that, you see already how this completely misses the point.

They don't have the authority. Again, that's a social construct. That's something we're deciding. And by the way, think about the, you know, she's saying it's a false analogy or whatever, which is completely wrong. But think about this concept. This is one of the things that just immediately falls apart about the idea of democracy. You're like, okay, they have the authority. Okay, where'd they get that authority from? We the people. Okay, so then the people have that authority.

How can the people grant a group of people authority that they themselves never had? Right? It's all just ridiculous. Anyway, it doesn't matter. So change the analogy to law enforcement then, okay? So if law enforcement was pursuing a bad guy, and that bad guy goes into a building with a lot of innocent people, and then the sheriff said, blow up the building, we would convict that sheriff of murder. And if anybody went there, he goes, no, it was totally unintentional that he killed all those people. He'd go...

What? No, it wasn't. He knew the people were in there. Yeah, but he only wanted to get the bad guy. That's just ridiculous. So again, this isn't an omission. I guess maybe I just assumed that people could figure this part out for themselves. So I didn't spell it out exactly, but it's not an omission and it doesn't change the analogy at all. The analogy does not fail. It doesn't matter. Again, it's...

It's a demonstration that you're fundamentally missing the point of what I'm saying when you start going, well, that's because they're not the cops. My whole point is it doesn't matter. The whole point is it does not matter. If it's a moral for people to do it to somebody else, then it's also a moral for people to do it to somebody else, even if those people happen to have blue uniforms and badges on. That doesn't change the moral characteristic of an action. That's the fundamental point. So no, you've done nothing so far. All right, let's keep playing.

That's also illegal. Nobody, not even the authorities, have the right to exact revenge. The correct equivalent is that the authorities, who are the authorised body to respond, are acting not out of revenge, but for the purpose of retrieval. Not just retrieval, but the capture...

of an individual who has committed a crime and has evaded responsibility and has verbally promised to commit the same crime 1,000 times more. Now let's give an accurate analogy. Okay, let's pause it before she goes to her accurate analogy. Again...

The she's she's bringing in the hostages here and like you can do that. I'll still go through this analogy with the hostages. But just to be clear, like this is the game that these people who support this this war in Gaza play is that there's always from the very beginning been what they call like the dual goal of the war. Right. They've always said it's retrieving the hostages and eliminating Hamas. Right.

So I'm more talking about the eliminating Hamas part. But if you're going to get into retreat, if retrieval is the only goal, like, okay, but you're still in the same situation, you still don't have the right to kill innocent people. Like now, again, I'm not saying like, I'm not claiming that there's no scenario where all things being considered reasonable people might support a policy where innocent people die.

I'm making the point that you can't claim it's not intentional. The concept of intentionality does not magically transform. Now, if you were trying to retrieve someone, let's say, again, make it a domestic person,

comparison. So the cops are dealing with a hostage situation. Well, first of all, what the cops do in that situation is they call in what's known as a negotiator, and you negotiate with the person who's taking the hostages. Now, if a sniper can get a clean shot at

Meaning we have reasonably high suspicion that nobody else will be hurt in this. Then that's one thing. But if somebody were to come in, let's say they kidnap one of your kids and they go hold them up somewhere and the sniper says, I have a shot. It'll kill three other kids, but we could kill the guy and then retrieve the kid. They'd be like, no, because you can't kill three kids to save one kid because when it's domestically, we view all human life as equal.

It's not the case with Israel-Palestine. But then I would just make the other point is that because she brings in that they've threatened to do it a thousand times over, which certainly is true. Hamas has made some threats about there's several or at least three high-level Hamas people who I've heard say that they're going to do as many October 7th as possible. But this is kind of a distraction from the point. It doesn't

threats when you're talking about what you're allowed to do based off threats a huge element of that is um is how credible the threat is so if I'm walking down the street if a crazy random person puts a gun to my head and says I'm gonna fucking kill you and I can get to a gun quick enough I have the right to kill that person that is self-defense if I'm walking down the street and

And a homeless schizophrenic person mutters to themselves, I'm going to fucking kill you. And then I pull out a gun and shoot them in the head. I'm guilty of murder. Like that was not self-defense. And similarly, the question doesn't just become what is Hamas threatened? It's more like, and is this actually achievable? You know, like, for example, our political leadership has threatened Iran up and down.

I mean, Donald Trump himself, John McCain, when he was running for president, said, if you remember famously, what's that Beatles song? Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. Like he thought it was a joke that we threaten around constantly. Now, if Iran were which they do have the capability to do, we're to like blow, you know, send a missile to one of our bases in the region and kill a whole bunch of our soldiers. They couldn't go, well, yeah, you guys threatened us.

So we had a right to respond. Not everybody here, including you, Iranian lady, would be like, no, that was an act of aggression. So it's just a little beside the point. But anyway, it has nothing to do with the analogy anyway. All right, so let's go to her better analogy. Analogy. A kidnapper breaks into your house and steals your child. You don't go after the kidnapper. You call the authorities. Law enforcement then pursues that kidnapper. But what that kidnapper does...

is he goes and hides himself in a school playground. He buries himself amongst a bunch of children and he's got that child in his arms. In this scenario, law enforcement has the right to act.

They don't have carte blanche, but they have the right to act. And not only do they have the right, they must act because failure to act is immorality. Failure to act leads to the potential death of that child. This is a non-negotiable. To claim otherwise is immorality itself. A response is a moral obligation. Okay, let's pause it right there. She's again going back and forth between the

the law and morality here. I am not making an appeal to the law. But again, the law is a social construct.

morality is not very different slavery was the law of the land you know uh i don't know if the holocaust was technically the law but certainly adolf hitler changed the laws to be able to disarm the jewish people and seize their businesses and put them in concentration camps you know the law when we're talking about what's right and wrong the the law doesn't matter

um, what matters is morality. Now, if you're going to say, because by the way, legally speaking, in fact, our Supreme court has ruled on this legally speaking, cops don't have an obligation to act. But if you want to say they have a moral obligation to act, I would probably agree with you in some cases. But again, it's awfully vague to just say, act. Nobody's saying you're not allowed to act. We're saying you're not allowed to murder women and children. So like that's kind of different. All right, let's keep playing.

A law enforcement officer shoots at the kidnapper and as a result of that the children around the kidnapper die.

Who do you think bears the legal, moral, and factual responsibility for those children's deaths? Okay, so just pause it again. Yes, nobody is arguing. In my scenario, if the sniper goes, I have a clean shot at his head, he shoots him, takes him out, but then the bullet also hits a kid accidentally. Yeah, nobody's claiming. Yeah, the moral responsibility of that would be on the person who took them hostage. It was a mistake, certainly, to take that shot, but he didn't realize it was a mistake.

However, if they level the building, then they are guilty of murder. And I'm not even talking about the law. The law would be on my side on this. I'm saying morally speaking, you intentionally killed these innocent people. Take a look at Gaza. Which one do you think that is?

Do you think it was a sniper who missed and hit a kid? No, they leveled the whole goddamn thing. Israel embarked on a policy that they knew with 100% certainty would result in women and children being slaughtered.

That's intentional. It doesn't matter how much you try to dress up this analogy. Okay, there were hostages. Yes, okay, absolutely. Does Israel have a right to try to retrieve those hostages? Do they have a moral obligation to try to retrieve those hostages? Sure. That's beside the point. It's not what I'm talking about. All right, let's keep playing.

I'm not going to make you guess, it's very simple. The kidnapper in all cases. Let's talk about why. Because the kidnapper set off a chain of events that made it so that the law enforcement officer had to respond and that response led to the deaths of children.

That kidnapper is the but-for cause of those deaths. Okay, let's pause it here for a second because this is just, I mean, this logic is ridiculous. And she's, as I've seen a couple, I guess she's a lawyer. I've seen a couple of these lawyers who try to defend these policies just abuse the but-for clause, which is like not at all what it means. Like the but-for clause is like something that they'll use in court cases to kind of like establish that,

like it's, it's limited in scope, right? So like if you're drunk driving and you hit somebody and you, they go, but for you being drunk, you wouldn't have hit this person. Then, okay, we can establish responsibility, but the, but this is just totally abusing it. Like you set off a chain of events. Therefore responsibility goes out the window. Like if, if,

Again, in the example, which is much more much, much closer to what we're talking about here, which is law enforcement blows up the building and kills a bunch of innocent civilians. They can't go. But for this guy taking someone hostage, I wouldn't have done it.

Even if that's true, they'd still be guilty. It doesn't matter. You can't say, oh, you set off a chain of events. Therefore, as she just admitted, you don't have carte blanche. So then this your entire argument here falls apart. It's not that's not the case. It's not the case that just because someone set off a chain of events, therefore, nobody else has any responsibility for how they act. And again, if you really were to take this to its ultimate logical conclusion, right?

then it would be carte blanche. Israel could do anything they wanted to Gaza, right? I mean, they could round up the population and just shoot everybody in the head. They could drop nukes on Gaza and say, hey, they set off a chain of events. Now, we all know on some level that this is complete horseshit. All right, let's keep playing.

knowingly and intentionally buried himself among innocent children in order to evade capture. It is that that is immoral. It is that that is repugnant. And it is that that caused the death of the children. I'm not saying this as a matter of opinion. Let me reiterate, that is factually, morally and legally the case.

The next question then is: would the cop, would the law enforcement officer face any responsibility? Yes. That is also possibly the case in the instance that their actions were negligent. Or in the instance that they had another alternative that would not have involved harming those children. They would probably not face criminal consequences, but there may be some consequences regardless.

Okay, let's pause it again. No, they'd face criminal consequences. I mean, again, I'm not making an appeal to the law. I'm making an appeal to morality and logic. But if you're asking me if the cops blew up a building, like not in your bullshit scenario, but in the scenario of what Israel's actually doing here, yeah, no, they'd go to jail for life without parole or get the death penalty because it's premeditated murder. Intentionally killing innocent civilians is premeditated murder.

and intentionally killing innocent civilians when you do it in a uniform is still the same thing. Let's keep playing.

There is no scenario where that kidnapper is not 100% morally, legally, and factually responsible for those deaths. Now, let's make the analogy to the war in Gaza. Okay, let's just pause it for a second. I mean, she's just completely wrong about this. Completely wrong.

Like, no, it's not the case. It's not the case that if somebody takes hostages that now they are 100 percent morally responsible for whatever the response is to that. That's just not true. And again, in the example, if the cops leveled the building and killed all those people, nobody would accept that. Oh, sorry, we're not responsible because somebody kidnapped somebody.

a child. Therefore, we could kill a whole bunch more children. Nobody would accept that domestically. And it's shocking that she would even attempt to make that argument and then state it as a factual certainty. You're absolutely wrong. No one would accept it. It would be horrifically immoral. The cops would be 100% morally responsible for their response. And also in any civilized country, they'd go to jail for the rest of their lives or be put to death for murder in the first degree.

Hamas broke into Israel on October 7th, not just slaughtered 1200 people but kidnapped hundreds more and then went back to Gaza. That triggered the right of Israel to retrieve those hostages, not to exact revenge but to retrieve. Secondly, when Hamas said we promise to do this 1000 times more,

That triggered the right of Israel to prevent that 1,000 times more by dismantling the group that made such a promise. Okay, let's just pause it here again. Again, this is just batting down straw men, which seems to be a really common theme amongst people who are supporting this war. Nobody...

Nobody I've ever heard, and I've heard some pretty fringe radical views on this stuff. I've never heard anybody say that Israel doesn't have a right to retrieve their hostages and doesn't have a right to take out Hamas. Never heard anyone say that. Has anyone ever, by the way, a bunch of Hamas people got killed on October 7th. I don't know the exact number, but you know, on October 7th, the IDF,

Many hours later, Tid ended up responding, there were firefights and they killed some Hamas people. Has anybody ever objected to that? Has anybody ever claimed that they didn't have a right to kill the perpetrators of October 7th? I certainly haven't heard anyone say that. And that's certainly not what I'm saying if you're doing a video responding to me. So we're talking about killing the innocent women and children.

We're not talking about retrieving your hostages or taking out Hamas militants. That's never been what the conversation was about. So you could say they have a right to do that, just like, again...

Imagine in my analogy or a mix of our two analogies, whatever here, but imagine there's somebody kidnaps a kid. They go into a school building. The sheriff comes down. He goes, blow up the building, blows up the building, kills a whole bunch of kids and then turned around and said, hey, I had a right to retrieve that hostage and I had a right to kill that kidnapper. Yeah, that's not really the point.

I think we'd all see that pretty clearly. All right, let's keep playing. ...decision that set off a chain of events that led to a war. And every single death that results from that war is caused by Hamas. Does Israel have any responsibility? Of course. Let's say that because of poor intelligence, Israel was led to believe that Hamas militants were within a particular building. Turns out that intelligence was wrong.

and Israel strikes that building and kills innocent people. If that intelligence was shaky, if there was no strong reason to suspect that Hamas were in there, that would constitute negligent or reckless behaviour. In such a case, Israel would also bear the responsibility for those deaths. However,

Under no circumstances, because Hamas set off this chain of events, under no circumstances would Hamas not be responsible for those deaths. The deaths in that very building. So when Hamas bears the responsibility for all of these deaths,

And Israel bears shared responsibility. Why is it that when we talk about objective immorality, we don't talk about the cause of that immorality? And that's exactly the point that Douglas Murray was making. Anybody can be against war. Not everybody understands the cause of that war. Everybody can say they know the difference between right and wrong.

Not everybody understands the source of that wrong. And that is the difference between moral grandstanding and moral clarity. Okay, so we can wrap up there. That's the end of the video there. I mean, I think she doesn't really add anything else after that. It's just a weird, you know, it's easy to oppose slaughtering women and children. Not everybody can support it.

Okay. You just see how ridiculous this is. It's so... It's funny in a way because, look, what I started out with on the analogy here, I think you'd have to recognize, it's not an opinion.

It's a description of reality. And so to try to twist yourself into pretzels here, to be like, oh, Hamas started the whole thing. Israel cannot have responsibility for that. No, actually they can. Actually they can. If you are implementing a policy knowing that it's going to result in innocent people being killed, you're responsible for that. And, you know, there's, again...

The real problem here is not the logic of what I'm saying. The problem is the implications. That's the issue that you have. Because once you accept what I'm saying is obviously correct, then you'd have to be like, oh, so maybe I'm supporting mass murder here.

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I did, you know, as I said the other day on Pierce Morgan, well, maybe I'll just forget that. I'll just go. We'll move on to the next video that I want because this one was actually a little bit more interesting to me. You know, I was kind of debating on whether I should even play that first video, but I just thought it would be kind of like a good, you know, I wanted to get into this view and I thought it would be good to have somebody disagreeing with me and kind of demonstrate how silly the trying to take this on is. Yeah.

But I did upset some of the military guys when I was saying this. And, you know, somewhat understandably, because they, you know, I'm sure they don't love the implication of what I'm saying here. You know, I mean, it is obviously it'd be pretty easy to take this, then go like, oh, so you're just going to sit here from the sidelines and say we're all a bunch of mass murderers. And essentially, yes, but.

I like you guys. So let me try to square that circle for you if I can. I look, I know, I know there's a lot of military guys who listen to the show. I've met a lot of military guys over the years. And I just, I find that I like them a lot. I find them really interesting. I also think that they're, I don't view you guys as guilty of mass murder. That is what war is.

But I also, you know, I have respect for the fact that I think a lot of these guys, first of all, they were propagandized into these wars by an evil machine. They are...

the greatest victims of this machine. Many of these guys, I mean, thousands of them have been killed. Tens of thousands of them have been severely injured. Tens of thousands of them have blown their brains out in the last 25 years. It's an unbelievable tragedy. And I do look at these guys and I think they were both

brave young men who were willing to fight and die to protect American liberty. Now, they didn't.

There's not a single one of these wars where that's actually what they were doing. But I still respect the fact that I think a lot of them were willing to. And this isn't speaking for all of them. Obviously, like, look, there are some people who get into the military because they're fucked up people. There are some people who get into it. It's a thing that people don't like to talk about a lot. But all the guys who have served, they know this is true. There's some people get into it because they want to legally be able to kill people.

But I don't think that is a large portion, certainly nothing even approaching a majority. I think most of them were propagandized and essentially bribed into doing this. And I think that, you know, people, especially people like, even like where I live here, like I'm like an hour outside of New York City, but I grew up in New York City and I

I think people from like big cities or around big cities lose perspective of how little opportunity there is in big parts of this country. I mean, where people are just out in the middle of nowhere and like there is.

There's like no opportunity for them. And then like the military comes along and goes like, oh, you'll get this and this and this and we'll pay for your college and we'll do this. And it's like, this is your chance to break out of here and make a life for yourself. And then it's like all this propaganda of like, don't you want to stop the enemies of America and the enemies of liberty? And would you put your life on the line to save your little sister and your countryman's little sisters? And I think a lot of these guys really are...

There's something admirable about people who are willing to do that. And I think that any society needs men like that, who have the courage to actually risk their own lives in the service of protecting others. But they got sucked up into this.

Into this racket. Anyway, I understand why this, uh, this analogy rubs some people the wrong way. And it was on, um, uh, what's the guy's name? Nick, uh, something. I'm, I, I'm familiar with him. I follow him on, uh, on, on Twitter. Yeah. Freitas. I don't know if that's.

The right way to pronounce it. I apologize, sir, if I am butchering your name. That is not a comment on you. It is a comment on me. I am known to do that. But Nick Freitas, who is like a Green Beret and a combat veteran, he's got a podcast, and it's him and some of his military guys, and they brought this up. So let's play this clip. I'll respond to it a little bit, and we'll see how that goes.

I mean, I get in fights with people about this because it's like, yeah, look, I don't like civilian casualties. I don't like when innocent people die. But I also understand. Hot takes only. But I also understand. I also understand that if you look at the projected casualty list for invading the Japanese main islands, and if you look at what the Japanese plan was for defending the main islands, they were going to give bamboo spears to 14-year-old girls. Like, this was not, they were ready to fight to the death. This is millions of casualties. We talked about.

Their entire interpretation is literally, oh, well, actually, what they don't tell you in school is the Japanese tried to surrender before America dropped the atomic bombs. And we just did it because we wanted to experiment. It's like, no, no, they didn't. They approached the USSR and said, hey, we basically want to cease fire permanently and leave the entire Japanese imperial government intact. Yeah. So they could rebuild an army and fucking do it again. Obviously, that was never an option. The USSR told them that that was not them trying to.

Surrender. And then you get all the kids are like, actually, Japan only surrendered because Russia attacked. Oh, fuck you. Really? Russia attacked northeast China with the Japanese sea in between? And that's why Japan fucking surrendered? Real quick, what was the Russian...

Navy like in World War two. Oh, there fucking wasn't one I remember because the only way they were gonna be able to shuttle troops was because of the US Operation hula where we were gonna transport it for him. So shut the fuck up It doesn't make any sense

But as far as the mainland invasion of Japan, we talked about it on the podcast before, but it's still a crazy stat that Eli's Purple Heart was made in 1945 when they were expecting an invasion. 1.2 million. Every Purple Heart awarded since World War II, I think, and still several in reserve, were made anticipating casualties of mainland invasion of Japan. I've read a lot of war memoirs and a lot of different...

on the ground person perspectives of different wars and interpretations.

By far and away by a hundred miles my favorite fucking interpretation of on-the-ground events is reading Japanese people's opinion of when the Marines and the army showed up during the occupation of Japan right after World War two seeing the sheer level of just grunt smoking cigarettes not giving a fuck growing a beard just disheveled angry to be here like how how did they beat us?

Some 19 year old from Nebraska with a BAR like, I want to go home. I didn't f*** around. That's a warrior class it's part of.

Taking over mainland would have been a huge problem. We talked about it before. So that was a completely different society. Like their warrior society was a war society. Never seen. Yeah. Ever. What was his name? The dude that stayed 30 years. And he wasn't the last one. Like there was people, there was two or three people that decade in the seventies. Right. Yeah. I think so. In the seventies that were still fighting around the Philippines, killing farmers and they were fighting world war two. Yeah. Yeah. That's,

What's crazy is that there's so many stories of it. It's not just one isolated incident. It happened a couple times. There was that one guy on some isolated island. He still speaks to graduates of Japanese... I don't know what their military academy or their officer corps school is, but talking about loyalty and Bushido and...

I look, I, I, I was, I was willing to put up with a, a lot more rules of engagement when I was in, now that my son's going through infantry basic training and, and I, and I do a reevaluation of a lot of the stupid stuff that we've gotten into. I'm, I'm a lot more, no, just drop the bomb. Yeah. All right. So look, I, I, again, it's like, I certainly understand the perspective of, of,

if your son is going into the the armed forces being like yeah i don't want my kid being put at any risk and if that means killing a bunch of other kids then like whatever it's not my kid like i understand that perspective i'm just saying if you're going to understand that then you got to understand the perspective is going to be coming back at you from the other side too and you know to i

I understand where they're coming from by saying, look, I don't like civilian casualties any more than anybody else. But look, here was the situation of World War II with Japan. And I don't agree with it. Look, again, I don't know enough about this to confidently have a strong opinion. But I do know that five-star general, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was against dropping the nukes. And I tend to think he's right about that.

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Check them out right now at monetary-metals.com to learn more about putting your precious metals to work today. That's monetary-metals.com. All right, let's get back into the show. But regardless of that, again, this really isn't... See, the thing, and I guess...

I said to Pierce Morgan the other day when he he essentially asked me, I have to go back and watch it. Like, I don't remember exactly how he said it, but I think he essentially basically said, which is it's interesting because people nobody can really argue with my like the view that I laid out up top. I mean, this lady tried to, but it's ridiculous. And so they go. But like so Pierce asked me something. He was almost like.

But then when can you fight a war? Like, you know, like, okay. So they'd like, do you have to be against all wars? Cause like all wars involve innocent people being killed. And like, which again is almost kind of funny from my perspective, but it's like, you know,

Yeah. It's, it's almost like if you're like, I don't believe in hitting my kids. Like, but how do you get them to shut up? It's like, yeah, you got to find other means now, don't you? Um, but I'm not saying there's never a scenario where somebody could reasonably support a war. Now, obviously the, the clearest cut is the American revolution type war where, you know, some, a foreign army invades. Yeah. You got a right to shoot back at that army, of course. But, uh,

Look, understanding that what I'm saying at the top of this is a factual statement. It's just objectively true that social constructs cannot redefine objective realities. They just can't. Social constructs cannot change logic. They can't change morality. Okay.

This is where this is really what it accomplishes once you recognize this universal truth that once you recognize that what you are advocating for is the intentional killing of innocent civilians, otherwise known as murder. Well, once you're advocating for mass murder, you're

then the overwhelming onus is on you. And what you can see here is these guys are almost... This is what's interesting about it, because everybody on some level knows that this is true. Everybody knows. Like, it doesn't matter... Just because you're using big, giant metal machines of death to drop explosives, that doesn't change the moral characteristic of the people who those bombs are being dropped on.

But once you accept that, what it does is it shifts the conversation and it places the overwhelming onus on the person who's advocating for war.

And I would just say to some of the military guys, I understand. I certainly understand where you would you would not like the way that my analogy sounds. You would not like the implications of my logic here. And I could certainly understand how you don't like the way it sounds coming out of my mouth.

Like, who the fuck are you, dude? There's some skinny guy who's never served and you're going to tell us that we're all a bunch of mass murderers or whatever. I get that. But I would just I would ask you to consider the fact that I am actually your greatest advocate. Like what I'm saying is that the onus now is on anybody who is supporting a war to demonstrate that it was absolutely necessary. Right.

That's what the standard for supporting a war should be. Not we want to take out Hamas. Not what the civilian to combatant ratio is. Not whether, you know, like there's no other standard that matters. Not whether we brought democracy. Not whether the last guy was a brutal dictator. All of these standards are ridiculous. There's only one standard that should matter for war, which is, is this endgame?

Absolutely necessary. Do we know to near certainty that more people will die as a result of us not doing this?

Okay, that is the type of standard that you'd have to get into. And I think that really, you guys are making that argument, whether you realize it or not, you're saying, well, they weren't ever going to surrender, and we would have had to invade and a lot more people were going to die if we invaded. And therefore, we had to do this thing. Now, even once you start arguing like that, and I don't agree, I don't think that's correct. But even once you start arguing like this,

You're kind of conceding that, yes, that's the standard. That has to be the standard. The standard has to be that if you're advocating for the mass murder of women and children, that you absolutely have to do this, that there is no other option. You've exhausted every other option. You know, not like, oh, we were negotiating. We were in phase one and we got 30 hostages back.

But then we started killing people and the talks fell apart and we didn't exactly love the negotiating terms. So we're back to slaughtering people like, no, no, no, no, no. You have to exhaust every other option. And if you really think about it, you guys, if you know, if that were the standard in Washington, D.C.,

Then I'm just asking you guys, think about all your brothers, right? Every single military person that I've ever talked to, every single one of them, and I've talked to hundreds of them over the years, every single one of them always says the same thing, which is that once you get into combat, the only thing you're fighting for is your brothers, right?

Like whatever the mission was back home, whatever the justification for the war is, once you get in there, it's you and your guys. And then there's guys on the other side who are trying to kill you and your guys. And you're there to protect your buddy and your buddy's there to protect you, right? And think about the guys who you know who are the most fucked up from these wars. And think about the guys you know who are gone. Think about their family members who will never be whole again.

All of this would have been avoided if, if my standard had been used in DC. And I would mention this as a point that I always like, uh, to bring up any chance that I get. Um, but back when the, uh, the terror wars were at their, their bloodiest or closer to that period, um, uh,

So at the height of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, or maybe with, you know, a few years after, but right around that time, in the 2008 presidential campaign and in the 2012 presidential campaign, which candidate got more money from active duty military than every other candidate combined? And it was Ron Paul.

Ron Paul got more support from the military than all of the other Republicans and Barack Obama combined in both 2008 and 2012, essentially being the guy who was arguing for this standard or the closest to this standard that any politicians ever, you know, taken. So.

I would just say, I actually, while I understand that on first glance, this could sound like the most hostile position to take toward combat veterans or active duty military, I think it's actually the one that supports them the most. It's actually the one that would only support

send you guys to go kill people and and potentially get killed if it were absolutely necessary and i would just say if just you know my opinion but i would think you know like if you're gonna judge me um for being somebody who's never served for advocating that we don't fight any of these wars wouldn't it be like a whole lot worse for somebody who's never served to advocate for every single one of these wars because that's the douglas murray's of the world

you know for all his you don't have expertise you've never been there you can't talk about it you know

He's sitting there trashing Darryl Cooper. Darryl Cooper served in the military. You know, there's nothing that I find more appalling than the cowards, the chicken hawks who lie America into war and then turn around and demonize the people who went and risked it all in those wars that they lied people into. So I would just say that those are your real enemies, not peace, love and libertarians like myself.

And then at the end of the day, this all really comes back to what I said up top. It doesn't, it's the ultimate Ben Shapiro, facts don't care about your feelings thing, right? That's just it. It really doesn't matter how any of us feel about any of this. This is, I've said before many times, this is the distinction between left-wingers and right-wingers often, is whether you can grapple with reality. Now, you might think it's nice, it's a nice idea that we can change our gender, but you just can't.

And you might think it's a nice idea that we could live in an egalitarian society, but you just can't. It doesn't exist. It's not the way nature is. And you might think it would be a nice idea. You know, any of these things, it's just there are reality. You might think it would be a nice idea if there were no average IQ differences between the races. Unfortunately, there are. You know, it's just this is the situation. This is reality. And in the same spirit of that, the concept of intentionality cannot be changed by a group of people voting it away.

Logic cannot be democratically decided. Morals cannot be democratically decided or decided by a dictator or anything else. There are certain things that are outside the control of human beings. Same way we can't decide whether God exists or not. And I'm not saying like, you know, whether you could prove he does exist or doesn't exist. I mean, I'm a believer, but...

Like whether God does or doesn't exist, we would all accept is something that it either is or it isn't. And we can't get together and choose. Like if God does exist, we can't vote him out. And if God doesn't exist, we can't vote him in. It doesn't matter if you're a government, doesn't matter if you're a military or a janitor. The moral characteristic of your action is the same regardless.

All right. That's the episode for today. Thank you guys very much for listening. Comic Dave Smith dot com to come catch me on the road. Part of the problem dot com. If you want to become a supporting listener, watcher, supporting fan of the show. All right. Catch you guys next time. Peace.